Vodafone has urged iPhone 4S owners to not upgrade to iOS 6.1, the latest available, because it believes the software jams 3G and phone connections.
Vodafone claimed that the bug is Apple's fault and that it affects Voda's rivals as well as its own UK network, although it only named Three Austria* as another impacted telco. The …

it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

Apple handsets are now legacy.

You'll see a lot more of this as they try to catch up with Android by attempting to copy, err, sorry, innovate its latest features into their quaint little old handsets - the ones which close users into their AOL-style walled garden as used in days long gone by.

Gosh how things change.

Skeuomorphic design is now about as fashionable as the Bay City Rollers. Market share is falling. The one-size-fits-all handset decision made at the start has come home to roost in spades - this approach so off target you can feel the embarrassing pain of the diehards trying to excuse them next to the S3s and N4s of this world.

And all the while you hear of Android demolishing them in handset sales, about to overtake them in tablets having just matched their share there, and manufacturers using it in fridges, washing machines, cars etc. This just highlights the wisdom of the closed vs open approach greedy Saint Jobs lumbered them with, snobbily turning up his nose at such crudities.

Still, they're currently still making a handsome profit from the remaining iSheep yet to realize what's being done to them, and that's all that matters. Whilst it lasts.

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

Strange

Last I checked, you had to join the Google borg to do anything worthwhile with an Android. Meanwhile my iPhone cruises happily along with all my calendars and contacts plugged into it and syncing both ways via CardDAV and CalDAV, to a server I set up for myself and I administer. The Android clients for those protocols are at versions 0.3 and 0.2 respectively, are broken in many exciting ways, and still cost money. I took my phone out of the box and pointed it at my Baikal install, and it just works. iCloud? If I wanted to, sure. But I don't have to. Pretty good for a "legacy" platform, and exactly what I expected when I paid extra for a premium experience instead of cheaping out on Android and all the suffering that implies.

The market share argument is cute, too. By that reasoning, Windows is a better desktop OS than Linux, because it has a larger install base. (Which reverses cause and effect; it's a better desktop OS than Linux, therefore it has a larger install base.) And who cares if their dishwasher or their toilet runs the same OS as their phone? I

Re: Strange

I've got an iphone, android and wm7.8 phone.

So ... what does the iphone ask for when you take it out of the box / reinstall it, other than an apple account? Numpty.

I had a mac once - utterly disgusted it wouldn't start until i entered a shed load of details including an address. Live in your little bubble blabbing on about activation in windows whilst handing the family silver over to apple.

Guess what? The internet happened. They all ask for far too much, and most of use willingly hand it over...

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

"You'll see a lot more of this as they try to catch up with Android by attempting to copy, err, sorry, innovate its latest features into their quaint little old handsets - the ones which close users into their AOL-style walled garden as used in days long gone by."

The problem here is hardly Apple trying to play catch up with Android. According to the article it's a bug with Exchange support, which Apple introduced with iOS version 2.0 in mid-2008, several months before the very first Android phone became commercially available.

So please take your rant somewhere where it might have at least some semblance of relevance.

Re: Strange

"I had a mac once - utterly disgusted it wouldn't start until i entered a shed load of details including an address. Live in your little bubble blabbing on about activation in windows whilst handing the family silver over to apple."

It certainly asks for your details but if you're observant enough to notice the "Skip" button at the bottom right you would find that OS X certainly does install and start without requiring any PII.

Re: Strange

At work we have many devices owned by many people. The only ones that have ever given me gripe connecting to our network and exchange system were blackberries. They wanted BES or nothing (no idea about the new ones). Sure blackberries could use imap but no calendar sync etc.

iPhones, symbian, WM6.5, WP7 and android (2.2+) all happily talked to exchange and our network. When we upgraded to exchange 2010 there were a few issues with old androids but 2.3+ seemed to work just fine (the WM had dropped off the radar and I think we still have a single WP phone who hasnt complained).

We have a few ipads that I am hesitant to install 6.1 due to the transaction log issues, i'll read up more before blindly updating (as I do with all service packs).

I have a galaxy s2 with a gmail account (as you need to have a gmail account for android to essentiall work) although it doesnt sync, has never been used, doesnt have a calendar attached etc. Ive use exchange and my work email from the first day I owned it. Not sure what you mean about the google jab etc. Our ipads are using an itunes account set up with works details. There are many ipads using that account without issue.

Re: Strange

That's not always been the case. About ten years ago, a company I was working for were holding an education seminar and we'd bought about 150 original CRT iMacs. We had to have a team of people opening the boxes, switching them on and going through that setup, which included entering full registration details. So, you've not always been able to skip that.

Re: Strange

"That's not always been the case. About ten years ago, a company I was working for were holding an education seminar and we'd bought about 150 original CRT iMacs. We had to have a team of people opening the boxes, switching them on and going through that setup, which included entering full registration details. So, you've not always been able to skip that."

I don't know about 10 years ago, but I've sold about half a dozen of my used Macs over the last 5 years. My process is to wipe the hard drive, reinstall the OS, and create a new user account so I can demonstrate that everything works. At no point have I ever been forced to enter any PII, which I obviously wouldn't do since I was selling the computers to other people.

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

Bullshit, it's not the open vs closed approach. But the "open and free" vs closed and not free approach.

If Android was open source but every OEM had to pay Google £10 million to use it I think you would see quite a difference in the number of Android OEMs.

As it stands, OEMs have to licence Google apps and marketplace from Google, however this is pretty much essential to get any sort of decent user experience (at least one good app marketplace is). But adding the ability to add apps generally will fall at the end of the development cycle anyway.

Re: Strange

I remember from my days at working at a large college these sort of registration problems. After doing a few I did a quick net search and found you can press a key combo at that screen to bypass it completely.

Re: it won't even talk to the BBC on this issue.

I see your point, but it still points out that Apple STILL cannot get Exchange support right. They are dealing with an issue from 2008? And something as big as Exchange support?

For a company as big as Apple, this really shouldn't be the case. That being said, Android has more than it's fair share of things that need "fixing". Why can't we all just agree that it's "best tool for job?" :(

Re: Crashing the mobile network

It's probably not the phone

Vodafone have a history of putting crapware on phones that are banded and locked into the network. It's probably something that Vodafone wants to take control of like the minutiae of your lives which the update prevents them doing.

On a plus point, maybe the update gives out free texts and calls on all international numbers, they won't admit to that will they?

Re: It's probably not the phone

Updates

As a rule I try to avoid being an early adopter of any updates regardless of the manufacturer. With modern kit there are so many circumstances in which the device is used that it is impossible to test for them all. So end users end up being the guinea pigs.

Re: Updates

Indeed. I do like the ominous advice that just says "don't download it", and no mention of "you've downloaded it? bad luck then"

It's tricky to strike the balance though. On my desktop I allow the autoupdates to apply themselves, primarily due to MS having a surprisingly good track record of these updates of late. 5 years ago, maybe not, but today I'm reasonably confident MS won't blow my machine out of the water, and in the world of zero-day exploits it's worth that risk.. Plus I can usually roll-back a patch if need be.

However on my good lady wife's iPhone, I believe it's set by default to notify you of any updates, and ask you whether to install or not. She clicked "ok". Fingers crossed there's no issue, as on that particular platform there's no rollback possible.

Fanbois possibly responsible for sat nav failure ?

A heck of a lot of UK Tomtom sat nav users have been unable to connect to the Live Traffic HD service since Feb 6th. The service is hosted on the Vodafone network. The error is something along the lines of "Can't establish wireless data connection".

I'll be well miffed if my getting stuck in traffic is Apple's fault. Not content with buggering up fanbois navigation they want to bugger up everybody else's.

Re: Fanbois possibly responsible for sat nav failure ?

From my recent experiences of Tom Tom traffic, its their servers that are the issue, not Vodaphone. Back in November the service was awful and when I was using it a couple of weeks back it went through a stage of going on and offline during a journey.

In-house testing?

2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

It's been a while since I did any air interface work (I was mainly L2 and above but I did tinker in L1), but this sounds like a classic interworking issue of some kind. The fact that the other networks aren't having it makes me wonder if Vodafone's push to get their RAN integrated more (less things to hook together) hasn't backfired.

What's the state of play, vodafone? Are you having growing pains? Or is this genuinely an iphone software issue?

In either case, the issue must be in the infineon (is that the chipset in the 4s?) "modem" side, rather than the apps processor, as my 3GS on 6.1 and my wife's iphone 4 appear to be fine...

All smells a bit fishy to me. Vodafone's network quality has been deteriorating since they stopped doing all their network business / maintenance with Ercisson exclusively, IMO.

Re: 2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

Re: 2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

Hmm. This is the same Vodafone network that crashed Nokia phones (mine, and that of a colleague, different models) from French network SFR as soon as they roamed onto it, although they could be forced onto other UK networks without problem.

Re: 2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

Vodafone are saying that voice calls and texts are affected, it's not just data connections. That and the specificity of the make/model of the troublesome handset they cite as being the cause would indeed suggest that it's an air interface problem, not some higher level of the stack.

It seems difficult to believe that Vodafone's network has some undesirable characteristic specific to the iPhone 4s. At the air interface level the network doesn't really know or care that it is an iPhone 4s that it's talking to; it's just another 3G mobile unit. And if the fault was in the next layer up in the UMTS stack it wouldn't bring down the whole air interface for everyone.

However if the 4s isn't complying strictly with the UMTS ait interface standard then it could easily bugger up the network. Mobile network standards like GSM and UMTS have relied on heavy duty compliance testing to ensure overall network reliability. The networks themselves aren't necessarily designed to be resilient to a rogue handset. UMTS 3G in particular relies heavily on all mobiles on a cell properly controlling their power output; get that wrong in just one mobile and the whole cell will struggle.

However, if it is Apple's fault it must be a deep down and rarely seen part of the UMTS standard that's affected because other networks are apparently not complaining of an issue. It maybe that Vodafone are doing power management in their network differently to other networks, so perhaps they've exposed a bug in Apple's air interface chip.

"All smells a bit fishy to me. Vodafone's network quality has been deteriorating since they stopped doing all their network business / maintenance with Ercisson exclusively, IMO."

3G (CDMA200 and UMTS) are difficult networks to manage at the best of times. They were stupid standards which the standards engineers put together without looking at the problems that CDMA had. Mixing up the management and maintenance is not going to help... 4G should be a lot simpler.

Re: 2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

Re: 2G / 2.5G / 3G air interface test engineer here...

Good call, bazza. True nuf that if the 4S is violating the noise floor or somesuch, then it'll nuke the cell for everynoe... interesting to have seen a mobe go out which might actually do this: totally agree on the WCDMA standard being a bit "knife edge" for consumer gear, I always wondered how brittle spread-spectrum might get when manufacturers got inevitably" lazy" :-)